The Fifth War

War in Afghanistan

In the sixty-four years since V-J Day, the United States has fought five wars big enough to be styled “major.” Two of these, Vietnam (1962-75, by the most common reckoning) and Iraq (2003-11, with any luck), were conceived in sin. Their beginnings were fatally compromised by deceptions that congealed into lies, abetted by profound geostrategic misjudgments. In Vietnam, illusions piled on illusions. The Tonkin Gulf incident was not even an incident, since an incident, to be an incident, has to occur. The fear that Communism would spread throughout Asia and beyond if it was not stopped in Vietnam turned out to be groundless; so did the belief that the other side was motivated more by totalitarian ideology than by national feeling. The Iraq War, too, was midwifed by falsehoods and follies: the falsehoods that the Baghdad regime possessed “weapons of mass destruction” and that Saddam Hussein’s was a hidden hand behind Al Qaeda and the attacks of September 11, 2001; the follies that the war would be a “cakewalk” and, most seductively, that it would “transform” the Middle East. In both wars, our enemy was only sometimes a conventional army; as often, if not more so, it was an elusive guerrilla force that was frequently indistinguishable from the civilian population.

Another two of our five big-scale wars, Korea (1950-53) and the Gulf War (1991), were legitimate in their origins and (by the standards of mechanized slaughter) scrupulous in their execution. The Korean “police action”—a euphemism, but one that carried real meaning at a time when hopes for a global order of international law were fresh and high—was fought with the sanction (and partly under the flag) of the United Nations. The Gulf War, too, had the sanction of the U.N. and its Security Council. Four decades apart, the two wars shared many features, starting with the moral and temporal clarity of their beginnings. Both were fought in response to armed aggression across international borders. In both, the American Administration resisted powerful political pressures to expand its objective to include the destruction and conquest of the regime responsible for the original aggression. And, after both, the cessation of hostilities along the restored borders has held, even if its form does not quite deserve the name of peace.

The war in Afghanistan scrambles the familiar categories so thoroughly that the customary rubrics for making judgments don’t fit. As in Korea and the Gulf, we went to war to punish an unmistakable act of aggression—this time on our own soil. But the aggressor was not a state; it was a band of freelance fanatics protected by a state. The goals of our response were as clear as the morning of September 11th: to call to account those who sent the murderers and the government that harbored them. Our action had the backing of NATO, which, for the first time in its history, activated the provision of its charter that declares an attack against one an attack against all. The support of the “international community” was nearly unanimous. Even Iran lent a hand.

During the election campaign, Barack Obama and the Democrats put forth a story—a “narrative,” as political reporters now like to say—about two wars. According to the story, the “good” war was the war in Afghanistan. But it failed to fully achieve its principal goal because at the crucial moment the Bush Administration, in its obsession with Saddam, diverted resources and attention to Iraq—a “bad” war. The diversion allowed Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban leadership to slip the noose at Tora Bora—a guerrilla Dunkirk. “I don’t oppose all wars,” an Illinois state senator had famously told a rally on the very afternoon in October, 2002, that the Iraq War Resolution was introduced in Congress. “I’m opposed to dumb wars.” Iraq was a dumb war; Afghanistan was, or could be, a smart one.

There was considerable truth in the narrative. But it contained an almost subliminal suggestion that somehow the clock could be turned back—that the events of the Afghanistan war’s first months could be replayed, this time with a better outcome. When Obama moved into the White House, he brought the narrative with him. In August, at a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, he said of the conflict, “This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity.” By October, he had ordered in thirty-four thousand more troops, doubling the overall American deployment in Afghanistan. But he had also begun an intensive review of the entire policy.

On Armistice Day, at a full-scale meeting of his national-security team, Obama was presented with four options. According to what little has leaked out from under the closed doors, all four options called for more American troops, from ten thousand at the lower end to forty thousand at the upper. Though some in the Administration favor a smaller military footprint instead of a larger one, that was not among the choices offered to the President. For this fifth war, there was no fifth option.

The President rejected all four. He has apparently decided against anything like a quick drawdown, but he wants a map that plots an eventual way out, not just an abundance of ways further in. As he told an interviewer, there can be no “indefinite stay,” no “permanent protectorate.” And he has questions he would like answered.

So do the rest of us. Does it make sense, for example, to spend lives and treasure trying to eradicate “safe havens” in Afghanistan when Al Qaeda has so many other—well, options, from Sudan to Hamburg? Will a bigger, longer, and presumably bloodier occupation advance or retard the ultimate aim of discouraging Islamist terrorism? Will adding American troops—at a million dollars a year per soldier—encourage Afghans to fight for themselves or prompt them to leave the fighting to us? Can Afghanistan’s nominal government, with its President elected by fraud and its recent rating as the second most corrupt on earth, be finessed or somehow remade?

The sum we are already spending annually on Afghanistan is greater than its gross domestic product. Are there nonmilitary ways we could deploy that sum which would advance our goals as efficaciously? Would even forty thousand additional troops suffice for anything resembling the ambitious nation-building program that General Stanley McChrystal, the top military commander in Afghanistan, has proposed? (Counterinsurgency theory suggests that it would take more than ten times that many; would forty—or ten, or twenty—thousand be only a first installment?) Any counterinsurgency campaign, we’re told, requires a very long commitment. Is the voluntary association of democracies called NATO, organized to deter war more than to wage it, capable of sustaining a twenty or thirty years’ war? For that matter, does the United States—a decentralized populist democracy struggling with economic decline and political gridlock—have that capacity? And what about Pakistan?

The President has come under heavy criticism for taking the time to ponder the imponderables. “The urgent necessity,” a respected Washington columnist wrote the other day, “is to make a decision—whether or not it is right.” Really? Does the columnist suppose that a country unable to find the patience for weeks (even months) of thinking could summon the stamina for years (even decades) of killing and dying? What Obama seems to have discovered is that this is no longer the war that began eight years ago. That war was an act of retribution and prevention. But now who are we punishing? What are we preventing? The old narrative is broken. The fifth war is becoming a sixth. ♦

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics.